Pillow of Saint Francis

I've been holding on this post for a long time. I gave the pillow to the birthday girl yesterday, so I can show you today!

One of my resolutions for this year was to make a pillow for myself. There were lots of knit pillows I like, I reasoned, and therefore I should just pick one and make it. It could live any number of places, and if it amused me half as much as embroidered pillowcases (and even here), it was an excellent use of time and materials.

The first step is to look at patterns. I quickly found one I knew I wanted to make, but not for me. It was the Pillow of Sei Shonagon, and it was fantastic.

To make it, first you knit the front of the pillow. This is pretty boring. Plow through.

The pattern called for 3.25 mm needles and sportweight yarn. The yarnovers were supposed to yield 1/2" holes. I do not understand how this could possibly work, but clearly it has worked for lots of people (or Ravelry is filled with liars, a thought too terrible to entertain). It didn't work for me, so I used 4 mm needles and dk weight yarn.



The front gets blocked. Then you cut two pieces of muslin and iron fusible interfacing on each one. One piece becomes the back of the pillow, and one is cut into strips with writing on them.

The pattern indicates you should write on the strips before cutting them. Listen to the pattern. Also, remember that you want all your words to be in between your light pencil marks. Do not, like some people, forget this on a couple of strips and start writing as if the lines were notebook lines that you could cross with the lower part of the letter g. If you do forget this, luckily you'll have enough fabric for some extra strips.



I used a fine tip fabric marker, and it worked just fine. I was okay with the fact that it wasn't going to look perfect. I do not have pretty handwriting. I have small, functional handwriting. My handwriting is the nerdy girl at the Spelling Bee; she knows the power is in the words rather than in the appearance of the words.*

I highly recommend you use a rotary cutter and mat to cut the strips. I borrowed my mom's.... awhile ago.... and still have it. I really should give it back to her and buy my own.**



I experimented with the width of the strips of muslin. I found that for my fabric, the 1/2" were too wide and 1/4" were too small. I split the difference and cut the strips at 3/8".

I threaded the strips through using a safety pin stuck through the end of each strip. I tried various other ways, and the safety pin was easiest. 

You can thread the strips through the yarnovers randomly. You will not be shocked to hear that I wasn't excited about random. Instead, I tried to get as much of each word to show. It ended up looking random-ish, and you can read it better.

The prayer of St. Francis is an important prayer to one of my best friends, and I love that this pattern showcases it in such a special way. I tried to write the negative words as small as I could and the positive words in large, spread out capitals. I wanted those positive words to be the ones that jumped out at you from the pillow.

Once the strips were woven in, I stitched the ends to the wrong side just to make sure they weren't going to slide or pop out. 

To connect the pillow front to the muslin/interfacing back, I used the overcast stitch from these instructions. I stitched around three sides, inserted the 12" x 16" pillow form, and then sewed the fourth side closed. I'm sure there's a name for the stitch I used for that, but I don't know what it is. It reminded me of the mattress stitch, if that makes any sense with one side being muslin fabric instead of knit. I'm waving my hands around helpfully illustrating it right now. You're welcome.

I love it. I'm thrilled with the way it came out. I'm thinking about making one for me with some Buddhist texts.

*At least, that's what I tell myself.
**Since I wrote this post months ago, I now am the proud owner of my own set. However, I still have my mom's at my house. Baby steps.

Ombre Chest of Drawers

A friend of mine works the occasional auction. This has the potential to be both gloriously bad and tremendously good for me, sometimes simultaneously.

Case in point:

It not only wasn't very pretty, but it also smelled funny. Andrew and I moved it into the house, plunked it in the middle of the living room so I could ponder its fate, and then within an hour moved it back out of the house until I could attack it with Pine-Sol. I cleaned it and then set about transforming it into Awesome.

To do this, I visited Giant Home Improvement Store and had them mix up six different sample-size paint colors. The employee handed them to me, saying, "I'm not going to lie. I don't know which of these is which."

"Oh, I'm sure it's fine. They're labeled, right?"

"Well, these colors weren't in our system..."

Optimistically, I reminded myself that the drawers were all the same size, so I'd be fine.

Over the next several evenings, I started painting. And I found this:

One of these things is just like the other...

Dude mixed two samples of the same &$()%_) color. Back to the paint store. 

Nine days after it came home to live with us, it was finished, and lo, it was glorious.

I put it in the yarn guest room. It's going to be the home for random supplies--fabric in one drawer, sheets of felt and needle felting stuff in another, embroidery in another, etc. There's a herd of Felici* on top to make it feel at home.

*I own an obscene amount of Felici. If you're a yarn hoarder knitter, you might not think I own too much just by looking at the above photo. However, the Felici is stacked three deep. It's a sickness. It's probably for the best that the line has been discontinued. Self-striping sock yarn is the crack of the knitting world.

Dither Mittens

Back in April, I wrote about retiring my swirly mittens. I set about replacing them last week.

I used yarn left from two other projects. I was worried I wouldn't have enough yarn, so I weighed one of my old mittens:

It was 27 grams. I weighed the new mitten:

The new one was 34 grams. It's amazing how using better yarn impacts the weight. The structure of the two mittens is very similar.

Then I weighed what yarn I had left:

Oy--17 of the darker and 16 of the lighter. The use of the light and dark yarn was pretty even in this pattern with the exception of the inside of the cuff. I knit that in the lighter gray, then folded it inside and knit the cuff together with the outside of the mitten. The cuff was 24 rounds, so I was definitely going to run out of the light yarn.

I decided to alternate the light gray with some leftover Sock that Rock Lightweight in a similar color (Deep Unrelenting Grey, leftover from these) on the second mitten so I wouldn't (hopefully) run out of yarn before I finished the thumb.

I can tell the difference, but it's not very noticeable... and it's the inside of mitten cuffs, so who cares? I barely had any light gray yarn left at the end of the second mitten (and not a ton of the dark), so it was a good decision.

The Dither pattern is a chart and some instructions for making socks, so I had to cobble together a mitten pattern. Details are on the Ravelry page if you're interested. I added a Latvian braid at the edge of the cuff because my love for them is pure. I made the braids to mirror one another, which amuses me.

Dither mitten (mine ravelled here),

knit in Indigodragonfly Merino Sock, Angst for the Memories 

and Townhouse Yarns Grafton 4ply, Menace

I love that I was able to use the remainder of two really great yarns to make these. They're extremely soft, and perhaps they'll hold up even better than the Swirly Mittens since they're made with nicer yarn. 

Welldigger Blues

I knit a lot of things that come in pairs. It's not unusual for me to get burned out on knitting two of everything, and that's when hats come in so handy.

Welldigger hat (mine raveled here),

knit in Mineville Wool Project worsted in Moutainside

The last time we made a trek to Simply Socks, they had worsted weight skeins from the Mineville Wool Project. I asked Andrew to pick a color to become a hat.

I decided this hat would look better with a more invisible cast on than my usual long-tail, so I watched a Eunny Jang video a few million times and did a tubular cast on.

I saved this in black and white because the waste yarn is bright orange--

as in my-eyes-are-bleeding-orange. You're welcome.

You cast on half the stitches you need and knit a few stockinette rows in waste yarn, then knit 4 rows in the real yarn, starting with a wrong-side row. On the fifth row, you knit one, then pick up the first purl bump from the first row of the main color and purl it, knit another, pick up another purl bump, etc. until you've alternated between knitting the stitches on the needle and purling the stitches you picked up from the first row. Continue for a couple rows of the pattern, and then you can take out the waste yarn. Eunny explains it much better here (although the site itself is clearly written by a nonknitter). The resulting cast on is still stretchy, which makes no sense to me, and nigh-invisible. It's the superhero of cast ons.

The Welldigger hat uses a slipped-stitch pattern. The result is a very squishy, thick fabric. I think this hat will be worn on the coldest days. Andrew, naturally, looks adorable in it, even when he's sticking out his tongue.

He's so cute I made him a pair of socks, too, even though he picked a Zauberball color with so much navy I spent most of the knitting time praying for a color change.

Blues for Andrew (ravelled here),

knit in Schoppel-Woole Zauberball #2134

I did my usual pattern for Andrew socks--1x1 ribbed cuff, 3x1 broken rib leg and top of foot. I started with 68 stitches on the leg and decreased after the gusset down to 64. I decreased the toes down to 20 stitches before kitchnering.

I didn't have time last night to pick yarn for my next project, so I did something completely out of character and just brought a book to read at lunch. I think the next project should be my mittens (See? Another pair.), and that's going to take some planning.

Knit on, my friends. Winter is coming.

Fucus asparagoides Sock

I've been knitting and painting furniture and working. There are some finished knits that are staring at me and pleading to be photographed. I gave in and brought one to work to snap a few pictures.

Fucus asparagoides Sock (mine raveled here),

knit in Townhouse Yarns Grafton 4ply, Menace colorway

This is part of Hunter Hammersen's KAL on Ravelry. I liked both Fucus asparagoides patterns so much that I did both (shawl here). Hunter loves herself a twisted decrease. Pointy needles are important.

As I was knitting these, I kept thinking about how this stitch pattern would look on a hat, or a cowl, or a scarf....